18 ms·
What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- photochemsyn 4y agoSo... is this another one of those "Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity by AD Sokal" - type efforts?
- kilgnad 4y ago>In defining what it means for a mathematical structure to be of conscious experience, our proposal does not answer the question of what this mathematical structure is. Nothing is answered in this article. We simply don't know. This article is up here because nobody is sure whether or not chatGPT is in any way representative of an aspect of our conscious experience. Is chatGPT a mathematical model of consciousness? We know it doesn't represent the whole experience because... it has huge flaws... but we aren't sure whether it represents an aspect of what we are. Disagree or agree, we have something in our hands and it could be it... but at this point we don't know.
- naasking 4y ago> We know it doesn't represent the whole experience because... it has huge flaws To be clear, we can't yet conclude that these huge flaws are due to its structure rather than the extra sensory data that we have and it doesn't. Doesn't really change your overall point, just wanted to clarify what we can and cannot conclude from the evidence, because people are far too quick to jump to conclusions after seeing the flaws.
- kilgnad 4y agoCompletely agreed. There are flaws. But there are times where the output appears that it cannot anything else other then complete understanding of what was given to it as input.
- ethanwillis 4y agoA big lookup table.
- naasking 4y agoA lookup table with compression. Intelligence is a form of compression.
- HKH2 4y agoCompression is necessary for intelligence but not sufficient.
- ethanwillis 4y agoThe vast majority of information cannot be compressed and the proof of this is trivial by a simple counting argument. In any case, it is still just a lookup table. Compression, unless lossy, doesn't change the meaning of the information in this lookup table. It just makes access more indirect. Hutter might think that intelligence is a form of compression, but I think that's just wishful thinking. It might be my ego speaking to say I think I'm the one that's right. But it's not my ego speaking to say that there's no hard proof to say unequivocally that intelligence is equivalent to compression.
- naasking 4y ago> The vast majority of information cannot be compressed and the proof of this is trivial by a simple counting argument It doesn't have to be lossless compression. Intelligence is also about being discerning about the information that's relevant, although that's basically the same point. > But it's not my ego speaking to say that there's no hard proof to say unequivocally that intelligence is equivalent to compression. Actually I think it's kind of trivial to see that intelligence is a necessarily form of compression. Abstractions, concepts, theories, these are all lossy descriptions that discards irrelevant details and capture only relevant details to make problem solving via deduction, induction or abduction tractable. And yet, using those concepts, theories, abstractions you can reproduce/predict observations with very high fidelity. That's compression. Do you have a counterexample of something that we consider intelligence that doesn't fit this model? I suppose it depends what specifically you mean by "equivalent".
- smitty1e 4y ago> Nothing is answered in this article. We simply don't know. It is unclear what necessitates any closed-form mathematical description of 'consciousness'. Such a concept seems tantamount to a faith claim.
- logicchains 4y ago>Nothing is answered in this article. We simply don't know. No, we haven't clearly defined consciousness. For a given exact definition of consciousness, we can determine whether something fits that definition or not. If we don't clearly define it, then we're just talking about a feeling, a qualia, and it's not possible for people to reach a consensus because they're not even discussing the exact same thing when they say "consciousness".
- kilgnad 4y agoThe consistency arises from the fact that even though we don't know the definition, we are in agreement in what is classified as conscious. We agree that humans are conscious, we agree that rocks are not conscious. This classification is clear and points to a underlying definition we cannot fully articulate. It is more than a qualia or whatever you call it. We know it has exact parameters simply because we are able to perform classification tasks. The consensus breaks for things like chatGPT. chatGPT straddles some uncertain border that we can't articulate. But in general for the term consciousness we reach consensus by how we classify things as conscious or unconscious.
- logicchains 4y ago> The consistency arises from the fact that even though we don't know the definition, we are in agreement in what is classified as conscious. Clearly there's not agreement in what is classified as conscious, given this thread/article. >We agree that humans are conscious, we agree that rocks are not conscious. This classification is clear and points to a underlying definition we cannot fully articulate. It is more than a qualia or whatever you call it. This is a fallacy. People agree that yellow is not violet and green is not violet, but they don't agree that indigo is not violet. Just because there are some classifications on which people agree about the label this doesn't imply they agree upon all classifications. A more direct example is whether plants are conscious or not.
- kilgnad 4y ago>Clearly there's not agreement in what is classified as conscious, given this thread/article. There is general agreement. We agree for most things like rocks and humans..there are a few things where we aren't sure, like chatGPT. But in general humans are in agreement for most things. >Just because there are some classifications on which people agree about the label this doesn't imply they agree upon all classifications. Well just because ambiguities for certain things exist doesn't preclude the existence of things that are utterly clear to be conscious or unconscious. We know humans are conscious and we know humans have all the required parameters to make them classified as conscious. We just can't deduce the exact thresholds and features that cause a phase shift when changed. But we know these parameters exist.
- dvt 4y ago> Is chatGPT a mathematical model of consciousness? Unless we reduce models of consciousness to purely stochastic processes, this is trivially false. And no one seriously reduces consciousness to probabilistic pattern recognition. > We know it doesn't represent the whole experience... It doesn't represent any experience. ChatGPT doesn't "experience" things as conscious things do. It's not even comparable to the experience of a simple invertebrate, for example.
- Lyapunov_Lover 4y agoThat's the (hard) problem of qualia. You can't say for sure that ChatGPT doesn't experience anything. And I can't say for sure that you do, either. It's trivial to dismiss it on the basis of "well obviously it's like that"—far more difficult is to say something about why it's not like that. I think consciousness has to be the product of an algorithmic process. I think this process can be summed up as "prediction". I don't think there's some secret quantum/soul/magic aspect to it. Which is why I think it's plausible that transformer models may capture some aspect of what we refer to as consciousness, though I don't quite buy it at a gut level. You say that "it's not even comparable to the experience of a simple invertebrate," but that's just you writing down what your gut is telling you. What is the experience of a simple invertebrate like, exactly?
- vba616 4y ago>You can't say for sure that ChatGPT doesn't experience anything. And I can't say for sure that you do, either. The question rattling around in my brain tonight is - if some, many, people don't develop a theory of mind as young children, how many of the people around me are like this? Is it just the philosophers? It seems of much more moment than the essence of ChatGPT.
- messe 4y agoGiven how many people in this thread don’t seem to grasp the idea of qualia, and think the hard problem of consciousness to be easy, I’m not entirely unconvinced I’m surrounded by a bunch of imperfect p-zombies.
- nurettin 4y agoTLDR; It's a tuple.
- mxkopy 4y agoI'm surprised that in all this hype Gödel Escher Bach hasn't seen a proportional comeback. Hofstadter outlines with some formality a very plausible kind of structure of consciousness, namely the "strange loop": a system of symbols or rule-patterns that contains a distinct but isomorphic (or approaching) description of itself.
- goatlover 4y agoDoes the strange loop explain how sensations like color and pain come from the isomorphic self-description?
- mxkopy 4y agoThe book doesn't really go that much into the hard problem of consciousness, as much of the ideas are orthogonal to that discussion. If Nagel asks, "What is like to be a bat?", Hofstadter asks "If the mind of a bat were a program, what characteristics would it have?" IMO the hard problem is not posed to be solved. I think of it like this. The world in which we are p-zombies is categorically indistinguishable from the one in which we are not, by an objective perspective. It is not a concept that we should use for an objective definition.
- geysersam 4y agoIn my opinion, it's unlikely that p-zombies are physically indistinguishable from conscious beings. It's like saying "a computer that works, but where the CPU is replaced by a piece of stone is physically indistinguishable from the real thing". We have not yet found a physical distinction. It seems likely that there is one.
- mxkopy 4y agoThe issue is, what else would we call the rock that does all the things a CPU does? If we can socket it into the motherboard and play games on it, what makes it so different?
- 4y ago
- conrod_ 4y agoIs there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"
- lamename 4y agoNot quite "in a nutshell" but honestly the page + exploring references will get you far https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
- ChaitanyaSai 4y agoFor the "Universe in a nutshell" version overview of neuroscience, I'll plug my own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (more on that below) Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness (https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Handbooks-Philosophy/dp/1138936219/ https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Hand...) is far more comprehensive and while being more academicky is still an excellent read. Unfortunately both miss what I think is easily the best and most computationally robust and fleshed out consciousness theory, but that's because it's so tragically unknown. I co-authored a book that covers this (while staying accessible) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-mind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-... So much of the stuff in the mathematical-this and physics-that of conscious experience is just crap because there is very little understanding of biological consciousness and what it is and where we can find it, and where we cannot. These start with assumptions of what consciousness is and then go on to mathematize these non-validated assumptions. (Integrated Information Theory) IIT is the most popular among these. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 -- this article captures well why IIT, and many like it, are bad models of consciousness.
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rslice 4y agoI can recommend this presentation by Joscha Bach on the subject: Virtualism as a Perspective on Consciousness, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6oekXIQ-LM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6oekXIQ-LM It honors the richness and complexity of conscious experience and provides a refreshing computational perspective on it.
- dr_kiszonka 4y agoI would like to learn how to translate relatively high-level ideas like in the presentation you shared (thanks!) to actual equations to code. Are there any good resources that you would recommend (YouTube channels, books, etc.)? They don't have to be consciousness-related but I would prefer to avoid books on modeling, say, mechanical things because they usually end up over-relying on the reader's background, e.g., in physics. I am more interested in learning how to express "novel" ideas in equations and code.
- inphovore 4y agoConsciousness is a quantum phenomenon. The mathematical structure is geometric in some way. The quantum domain acts as a sieve. Constructive and distinctive interference perturbs the quantum substrate, which is the existential universe itself. Consciousness is thus the universe peering back into itself, and living systems are the biotechnology which animate this phenomena. The unique properties of this are: Our “computation” is non-linear. The quantum coherence creates a holographic subjective singularity. These allow the illusion of one perspective among billions of participating neurons. The more neurons in a cluster, the higher resolution the “pocket of consciousness”. These bubbles compete in the mind for influence. I say this acts much like a hologram. The sieve of consciousness works through constructive and destructive interference.
- alexvoda 4y agoAll you've said beeing a hypothesis. We have yet to see proof of any of it.
- inphovore 4y agoGeeze, that’s not how truth works actually (not confined to the horizon of ignorance), though I accept your skepticism. Your downvotes are your HYPOCRISY! I have a whole long list of assertions you will fight me on for the love of your ignorance. In this moment I cannot fully invest in exhaustive debate. I will prattle on a little more in an unstructured form for the sake of intrigue. There are several things going, one being this parallel discussion on quantum entanglement (and the parallel discussion for our minds being hackable for another time.) I would like to describe to you the technology of consciousness in ways I have come to understand, yet I will expect to be scorned and badgered for the inherently abstract nature of our topic. Neurons in isolation exhibit a telemetric awareness of one and other The Cosmic Serpent was inspiring in my youth. The primitive ideas the author discusses relate. Microtubul structures likely provide a substrate for our experiential being. Electrochemical processes flash these substrates, and then gently and delicately suss the state resolve as though a sieve + stack. The sieve is the constructive /destructive aspect. I say “stack” as resolve is apparently pushed and pulled or read/write like memories, yet I believe this is where our non-classical thought strategy arises. The outcome is more like a micro-inference rather than a faithful memory. Constructive and destructive patterns form an analog isolated holographic “image” (though not merely a picture, in every shade and depth of every experience we are capable of having.) Any information can be pushed into this stack, yet interference collapses to associations (or novelty) producing a primitive psycho-emotional echo, other parts of the brain process into higher level responses. Consciousness is not intelligence. Consciousness coopts intelligence as a tool for perpetuation. How does this not sound like consciousness: “consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of our existential being.” Existential being is any matter, yet all cold matter is dormant without animation through life or other technology. The potential is the hyper-dimensional capacity of the carefully arranged atoms in our neural substrate. Inflection is any perturbation of the quantum dynamic (which is usually pure chaos.) it is the atom in the universe which exists, the living system is a technology which extends and allows the aggregate scope of potential awareness and feedback. The quantum layer is like an echo chamber for your jelly bag brain. This echo chamber is the material universe (which you are) echoing experience upon its analog subjectively scoped potentials. See the idea, not the comment quality.
- nathias 4y agoDefinitions are not magical bindings that would guarantee the adequacy of a representation but the fixed points assumed to aid communication, science is not a 'search' for definitions, it uses definitions to communicate what it has discovered. The mathematical structure of phenomenology is kind of a weird specific task, because it's traditionally equated to the structure of the world or representation in general. This is because in theory 'consciousness' means very little when abstracted from the theory of its implementation, on the other hand if we try to preserve the relation of consciousness with the implementation we already have to choose between several. I think the best candidate for the existence of some of most rudimentary sentience is the gamma oscillations that function as coordinator functions of different neural populations, so the math to represent this would be take that as a basis.
- majikaja 4y agoI think people just need to accept things as they are. People have thoughts and they happen to correspond to brain activity. So be it.
- amelius 4y agoWe need to accept gravity. Things fall down when we drop them. So be it.
- majikaja 4y agoDesign some experiments for consciousness then you're talking. I'm not going to waste my time expecting to find answers to such things on a message board for software engineers and money men. May as well be 4chan
- scotty79 4y agoAll structures are trees if you squint hard enough. Of different shapes. Maybe with some interlinks.
- bruce343434 4y agoSo graphs? Which are matrices.
- evv555 4y agopartially ordered sets / hierarchal structures of entities and relationships
- bruce343434 4y agonot all graphs can be represented as a poset
- evv555 4y agoTrue yet most natural ontologies are represented as a poset at the fundamental levels.
- scotty79 4y agoGraphs are just tangled mess. Trees are the last useful structure before you need to go absolutely bananas with graphs.
- tudorw 4y agohttps://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/9900/consciousness_as_a_memory_system.19.aspx https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/9900/consci... Just putting this out there in case anyone has read this and would care to share an informed opinion with a layperson!
- sylware 4y agoWould be better to start to setup a spectrum of mathematical definitions for the "emergence" phenomenons.
- gibsonf1 4y agoThe fundamental flaw with this entire branch is the premise that consciousness is mathematical. Math is a tool of reason, not the cause. And once you adopt this premise, it makes all progress toward understanding reason impossible especially how concepts work, the key differentiator between humans and other animals without conceptual faculties.
- antiquark 4y agoOne way to disprove this idea would be to find some obviously non-conscious phenomenon that complies with this mathematical structure.
- giardini 4y ago42?
- kbrkbr 4y ago> [W]e assume that the > term ‘aspect’ denotes an instantiated phenomenal property or quale. The set of aspects A(e), > then, comprises the phenomenal properties or qualia which are instantiated in the experience e, > also called the phenomenal states of the experience e. Our question, then, is what it means > that “any set of phenomenal states of a subject at a time is phenomenally unified” > [...] > A promising answer is the > so-called subsumptive unity thesis, developed in [5]: > “For any set of phenomenal states of a subject at a time, the subject has a > phenomenal state that subsumes each of the states in that set.” [5, p. 20] > According to this thesis, what underlies the experience of the unity of a conscious experience > is that for any set X of phenomenal states in the conscious experience, there is a further > phenomenal state that subsumes each of the states in X. This phenomenal state characterizes > what it is like to be in all of the states of X at once [5, p. 20]. > [...] > Phenomenal unity gives rise to a mathematical structure of conscious experience. When I try to state this in natural language I come to something like "Conscious states consist of qualities, or contain qualia. And they are unified _in_ consciousness, meaning that our experience is whole. The mathematical structure is this: For any set of experiencing qualities there is a(n additional) state integrating them all into one state." When I studied philosophy in the 2000s we discussed such kinds of solutions already in a seminar and found them lacking on two grounds. First: there is no clear notion of non-conscious qualia, and Ockham help us here to keep it so. But if this is true, each of the integrated states already presupposes the whole (because it is already conscious, consciousness is more the medium of qualia), which then cannot come after them to unify them. Unless one wants to assume that a lot of conscious splintered experiences are integrated into a whole later. That would be even more questionable, because who experiences them? Second: The integrating state needs another integrating state to integrate it into the whole of conscious experience etc. ad inf. Unless it is a state that integrates itself into the whole as well, which would just be a sleigh of hand - because exactly that is the riddle that a mathematical structure must overcome to be about consciousness. The self-reference, the self-presentation of consciousness. Apologies for lacking the proper terminology here. edit: formatting
- ttctciyf 4y agoYeah, I think that for one conscious experience e they would like to say not only are there a bunch of qualia involved (the "aspects" of e: A(e)) but that, in Nagel's famous phrase, there is something it is like to be the subject experiencing A(e) in the same instant, over and above the set of qualia A(e) itself. I agree that "non-conscious qualia" is an incoherent notion, but I'm not convinced this rules out a "phenomenal unity" as you argue - they are positing the unity as "phenomenal" not as the substrate (or medium, as you put it) of qualia, so more than just the raw fact of consciousness is implied. One point of comparison might be Wittgenstein's famous example of the duck-rabbit - a bistable ambiguous image that can be seen either as a picture of a duck or as a picture of a rabbit. One might assume the qualia associated with looking at the picture are the same whether one is seeing it as a duck or as a rabbit - the same shapes and colours - and yet there is a difference: > The change of aspect. "But surely you would say the picture is altogether different now!" [...] > If I saw the duck-rabbit as a rabbit, then I saw: these shapes and colours (I give them in detail) -- and I saw besides something like this: and here I point to a number of different pictures of rabbits [...] > 'Seeing as ...' is not part of perception. And for that reason it is like seeing and again not like. Perhaps this un-perceptual yet pervasive and arguably phenomenal unity subsuming the duck-rabbit qualia - that which flips from duck to rabbit and back - is analogous to what the authors intend with their "subsumptive unity thesis". Congrats on commenting on TFA, btw :) I thought it was an interesting read, though I start to lose my grip on the math around the topology section.
- 2snakes 4y agoConsider TDVP (Triadic Distinction Vortical Paradigm) from Ed Close (erclosetphysics.com) and Vernon Neppe (vernonneppe.org), based on the work of George Spencer Brown, who invented the Calculus of Indications which encapsulates boolean logic but does so in a profoundly elegant visual grammar. One that dramatically shortens calculation visually. Distinction: to distinguish anything from anything else. Consciousness: the distinction of self from other. Also has further distinctions of inside the self and the other organized into patterns, and distinctions drawn for negative entropy and spiritual evolution, the basis of all change. Distinctions have three parts, that which is distinguished, that from which it is distinguished, and the consciousness drawing the distinction. This has reality differntiation along the lines of the Perceptual, Conceptual and Existential, and distinctions themselves have variables of Intent, Content and Extent. Imagine a idealist, unified monism 9-D model of reality that has three main prongs. Other unstable particles teased into existence temporarily by LHC are not very useful whereas normalization based on the characteristics of the free electron when it comes to Space/Time/Consciousness are relevant. For symbolic representation of Extent: this is Space that has three dimensions and is represented using integers. And then there is Time, which are image events of cause and effect on a timeline, that are represented like a plane, a volume, or that of more other people, and this represented with imaginary numbers. And then there is Consciousness-awareness, complex numbers, the awareness of being, or the distinction of Self from Other as spiritual awareness or life trace, and it too is a plane, a volume, and that of more other people. For the symmetric resonance of Content we have Mass (subatomic, atomic and the universe), Energy (photonic, electric, magnetic) and also Consciousness-meaningfulness (individual, group and cosmic) aka gimmel, the third form of reality which is not mass or energy. Primary Consciousness is one thing, but then gimmel, the organizer, is second and mass/energy is third. For Intent or meaningful information: existential, conceptual and imaginary. In this model we are all moving towards experiences like what is termed Cosmic Consciousness (omnipresence) in Yoga, especially along the lines of Kriya Yoga as brought forward into the West by Yogananda. Anyway, perhaps a start towards mathematizing consciousness that is compatible with ancient wisdom and modern mathematics.